Networking architectures have grown increasingly complex in communication environments. For example, small cells have gained notoriety due to their capabilities to connect wireless devices to a network. In general terms, small cell access points can operate in a licensed spectrum to connect user equipment to the network, often using broadband connections. For a mobile operator, small cell access points can offer improvements to both coverage and capacity, which is particularly applicable to indoor networking environments where macro cell networks typically suffer coverage limitations. Small cell access points can also offer an alternative networking architecture to deliver the benefits of scalable small cell deployments. However, there are significant challenges in managing cell updates for mobile subscribers transitioning between small cells, particularly in the context updating a small cell gateway each time a small cell update is received by a small cell access point from a user equipment (UE), which can overload resources of the small cell gateway when many UE are transitioning within a particular small cell deployment.